KiThis turned into like, a textwalltastic “musical adventure” rather than a single song recommendation. I’m sorry. If you want you can just listen to the last one I linked, that’s the best. ANYWAY.
If you aren’t ‘theatrically inclined’ or you haven’t ‘listened to music in the last sixty years’, you may not be aware of Mack the Knife. It has become some kind of schmaltzy jazz standard because it sounds bouncy and cheerful, even though it’s about a dude cruising around murdering the shit out of everyone in increasingly nasty ways. I feel this proves once and for all that nobody gives a damn about words. The lyrical dissonance is deliberate, and was an effect very much favoured by Bertholt Brecht (who wrote the Threepenny Opera, from which this song was taken) and as interesting as I find the stylistic/thematic/theatrical connotations, I suspect I am alone in this so will shut up.
This is the original, sung by Brecht, which rules, because he’s a damn legend and he can’t sing. Here’s Bobby Darin’s jazzy English version, variations on which basically every damn singer has done at some point, but this is among the better ones. (Fuck off Robbie Williams. Honestly.)
Anyway, it was a badass song about a murderer, sung quite cheerfully. Now everyone reckons it’s a boring old jazz standard, so a bunch of bands who think they’re cool and edgy have done ‘darker’ covers of it, which actually suit the lyrics way better than the original music did. So, uh, way to fuck up what Brecht was trying to do here, bands, whatever. A band called SLUT does Mackie Messer. I wanted to link you to Udo Lindenberg’s because it’s the same idea but more interesting than this, but it’s not on the tubes and this one is pretty okay as well I guess, if only because Wikipedia tells me the band “lived and recorded in a castle near Ingolstadt” for a year. German Indie Rock Bands: Cooler Than You. It’s in German so uh deal w/ it. If you want a translation it’s basically “THERE’S THIS GUY WRECKING EVERYONE’S SHIT OK” for half a dozen verses. The first few lines translate literally as “The shark has teeth, and he wears them, in his face”, and damned if English can be that cool.
I also feel compelled to link you to Nick Cave’s version, because a) he doesn’t bother making the first verse more English-appropriate, he just sings that idiom literally ‘cos it’s badass, b) he manages to be truer to the original than anyone else in both lyric & tone & atmosphere while still making it his own deal, and c) he’s just a delightful dude to watch, check his dancing/performance/general existence out.
